How to block calls on your iPhone
Telemarketers won’t be stopped by the fact that you have an iPhone. They don’t care if you have extra minutes and wouldn’t like to spend those talking to them. Normally you could ask them to remove you from their list but that doesn’t happen very often. Some will call you regularly between three and five in the afternoon. Calls come from a number listed as 480-567-0012. If you do a Google search for that number you’ll see a lot of threads and posts regarding it.
There are a lot of scammers that claim to represent the National Do Not Call Registry, a registry that allows one to be listed as a number whose owner does not wish to be bothered by telemarketers and other unsolicited numbers. Such scammers that pretend to be from the National Do Not Call Registry will call you and start asking for your personal data. You should not give out your data to anyone.
If you happen to have an iPhone, there are several things you could do to block these calls. In this article we’ll teach you how and what to do to get rid of people pretending to be from National Do Not Call Registry and other telemarketing firms.
First things are first
There is no easy way to block unwanted calls from your iPhone except the do not disturb feature in iOS 6. Other than that there are no security settings or easy ways to stop certain numbers from reaching you.
Blacklist Apps
In the Apple App Store there are a ton of applications pretending to blacklist numbers for you. Sadly many of these have descriptions that give the impression they will do just that. In fact, many are just apps made to gather your information or do otherwise damage to your phone and free time. If you surf the Internet looking for reviews to such apps you will come up with information such as the one below.
Not all hope is lost
If your device is jailbroken there is an app you could try and that is available in the Cydia store. iBlacklist costs $12 and it does its job well enough. It will block any calls you don’t want to get through and it will also work on SMS messages. You can set a pattern for Unknown calls or Restricted ID calls and reject or block them in bulk. iBlacklist also allows one to whitelist groups of caller. You won’t find iBlacklist in the App Store. It is only available from Cydia, which is a shame. If you’re scared by the high price of this app you should take a look at what other people are saying about it. Responses have been positive so far.
What else can you do?
The iPhone does not yet support blocking calls. You don’t want to jailbreak your device and would like an alternative to unuseful apps in the App Store. You can download this silent ringtone and drop it in the Tones section of your iTunes app. Sync this ringtone to your Device then go to Phone – Recent Calls and select the arrow on the right. Edit the callers as new contacts and set their ringtone to the new ringtone you have just copied over. When you are done press Done. Next time these people call you you won’t hear them ring.
Native support for blocking calls on the iPhone is desirable but without the help of Apple this dream is not realizable. You can also register your number with the official National Do Not Call Registry because it only takes a couple of minutes and will save you time in the future.
